There has been recentnewsthat a group of researchers have had success in using gene therapy to cure some monkeys of color-blindness.
My SO and his brother are red/green color blind. We have friend that is red/green and yellow/blue color blind. From none of these 3 have I ever gotten the sense that it is much more then a minor annoyance. Sure, it’s kept them from being a pilot, or an interior designers. It’s make electronics work interesting (both because of colored wiring, and because resistors are marked with bands of color). Some computer games have color coded information. But all of those are pretty minor.
So, for anyone that is color blind out there, is this news an answer to a prayer? It is something you might try, because it would be cool to finally see what gets people so excited about fall colors, or is it a meh kind of thing?
Not being colorblind, I can’t respond to the OP, but I would like to venture a slight expansion to the question.
This link shows some images the way a colorblind person would.
My question is how would the newly “cured” person’s mind process colors they’ve never really experienced before? Theoretically, all the wiring for processing has been set in place at a very early age. So would they really be seeing red as red?
I’m happy the OP recognizes that there is more than one form of colorblindness.
As my colorblindness (which is more of a color weakness - specifically deuteranomalous trichomacy) has never more than the most minor of annoyances to me I don’t see the point in correcting it. Not worth the effort and the presumed expense. Now, a cure for food allergies… THAT I’m interested in.
And, by the way - being colorblind did NOT prevent me from earning a pilot’s license. The US does let the colorblind fly. Not all countries do.
However, if my vision was corrected to normal color values it’s not that I would see anything new in the way of hues, it’s just that I’d be seeing more of a particular part of the spectrum. Sort of like adding more green to your screen display. I’m not sure I’d like the color shift, as I have had more than 40 years to get used to my way of seeing things.
If I was a little younger and my color blindness was preventing me from doing something kickass like joining the FBI or being a Navy Seal, maybe. Now, eh. I forget I’m colorblind for weeks on end until something happens to remind me of it.
Probably not, unless it was dirt cheap and relatively easy to do.
It would make some things easier (getting a yachting license was more difficult for me that it was for the rest of the crew, but I got it eventually). And, as I stated in a different thread, playing Battlefield would be easier for me if I could quickly identify friend from foe, but meh, hardly worth the trouble.
I think it would just confuse me. Most of the time I can deal with it, and have had some fun because of my problem with colors.
There are certian tritation test on cooling tower water that I can not see. The Navy put me on a bridge of a ship once and I could not make out the red running light of another ship at night.
I’m not colorblind, but if I were, I think I would be most worried about not being able to change back to the way of perception I was used to if I had the treatment and didn’t like the shift. (Assuming cost of the procedure, level of invasiveness, etc, were not an issue…that would effect my decision just as much).
Is this a one-time deal? Once you get the injections are you cured (or doomed, as the case may be), essentially stuck with this new way of perception forever? Or do you have to get regular treatments, in the absence of which, the effects of the protein would slowly wear off, and if so, how long would it take to get back to normal?
At any rate, I think adults with color-blindness would be more likely to try it if it didn’t have to be permanent.
I have for a long time found it interesting that my friends with color-normal vision seem much more concerned about “fixing” it than any person I’ve met who actually has colorblindness. It really is a case where other peoples’ perception of the “problem” is much more of a problem than the statistical abnormality of having somewhat different color perception.
I’m pretty much color-normal (though, I suspect a very slight depletion in the red/greens), and I’d be curious to add infrared and UV as new colors to my vision if I could (especially if the majority of the population saw this way). But, I’d be nervous about it screwing with the way I’m used to seeing the world in a negative fashion. Would looking at my friends and family repulse me?
So, if I can hijack just a little, aren’t those that are colorblind just a tad curious to see what the world looks like with a full spectrum?
Another thing to remember, is the therapy would most likely be a gradual onset. It’s not like you would gain full-color vision in an hour. It looks like it takes several weeks. So, maybe that’d feel more natural as the individual gradually notices a brighter distinction here, and hey! is that this “red” thing everyone’s been going on about?
Honestly? Not really. I don’t think most color normals get that what I see IS normal to me and I just don’t miss what I don’t have. I lived the first 30 years of my life unaware that I had a “problem”.
I’d really much rather have normal depth perception, as my vision is also lacking in that respect.
I’m not color blind and I don’t have a cite for this, but years ago I read an article about people who were totally blind but had their vision restored through some kind of operation. It seems many of these people considered this at best a mixed blessing. Having spend all or most of their lives without sight, this new visual input was disorienting and confusing. Depth perception was a problem because these people had a hard time figuring out if something looked small because it was far away or if it was really just small. They also had trouble learning to recognize familiar people and objects. I remember one man still couldn’t tell his cat from his dog unless he touched them.
The shift from color blind to not color blind would be much less dramatic, but I’m sure it would still be weird for the person experiencing it. I don’t know that the benefits would outweigh this for an adult. I’d think it would be more likely for parents to request gene therapy for their color blind children than for color blind adults to want to change.
It would help if there was some explanation of the terms on the site. But for me, I can’t see any numbers in any of those fucking Ishihara dot tests and never have. I hate them.
There is a thread, somewhere on the Dope, where someone ran an experiment where they adjusted the color on an Ishihara plate that normally I can’t see until I could see it.
I think one of my reactions was “Ugh, is that how color normals see the world? How garish!” or something of the sort.
But if I (or someone else) could find that link again the color normal might get a sense of the sort of color shift a colorblind person being cured of colorblindness would experience. It might help you understand why some of us would less than wildly enthused about such a change.
Trying to imagine what it would be like (for partial color blindness) is fairly easy if you’ve ever worn blue-blocker type sunglasses. The vividness of color is a pleasing thing. On a daily basis it’s a wondrous thing to see a blue sky versus a gray sky. The day has all new meaning.
And ultimately, when asked if a dress makes someone look fat a person can say: “no, it makes you look like a whore”.
I don’t see a down side to this unless they have to scoop your eyeballs out with a spoon to work on them. Gray sky’s start to look pretty good then.
If it were possible to add resolution or better night vision I would go for it and if the general populous could see a wider spectrum then I would want to be able to share in what they see.
Another deuteranomalous trichomat here. No, I would not change. I don’t consider my color vision to be a deficiency. To be sure, occasional problems arise in a world dominated by people with normative vision, but I’m a square peg in a world of round holes person in general.
There are hues I have no name for. Are the outer walls of the Spanish takeout restaurant in my neighborhood yellow or lime green? Out of curiosity I mean to ask someone someday, but for now it’s a nameless color.
I have an indifference to colors which I attribute to my vision. I can “accurately” identify quite a few colors but tend not to notice them. Don’t ask me what color blouse Leticia wore this morning because in all likelihood I won’t be able to tell you. Don’t chide me for asking the sex of your infant because I can’t discern light pink from light blue. To the phlebotomist who asked me recently to hand her the red vial beyond her reach, the recent I hesitated was not because I could not identify the red vial, but what if they were mixed up green vials? I can see the early autumn colors but only after someone mentions them.
I don’t drive and don’t like driving because it takes too much concentration, especially at night when traffic signals get lost in the array of neon lights. I can recognize the redness of brake lights on the car ahead of me, but it takes a moment or three to process that thought.
I used to wonder why teachers corrected papers in red, such a pale, weak color. I assumed that everyone read the names of crayons before using them and that once the crayon labels were gone they were useless. How did others know I had been out in the sun too long? How did they know the hamburger was cooked rare without tasting it?
I’ve been this way for 55 years. It’s who I am. Even in my youth I would have refused corrective therapy, but like a previous poster suggested, I might give it a try if it were inexpensive and reversible.
To answer a couple questions raised in this thread, the cure does take months and appears to be permanent. Somewhat to the experimenters surprise, the mice were able to process the color information in the sense that certain discriminations that they could not make (more precisely, could not be trained to respond to) became available to them. That doesn’t mean that a formerly color-blind person will perceive red the same way I do (for that matter, why should I think that anyone else perceives red the same way I do?) but it appears they will be able to recogmize differences they could not previously.
As for the original question, well if I suddenly lost my color vision or just the distinction between red and green and if the therapy were proved safe (obviously there would have to be volunteers), yes I would go for it. I’ve had 72 years of color vision and I like it.
More speculatively, birds have an additional color pigment that mammals lack. (Actually, most or all non-primates and all male and 1/3 of the female new world monkeys have only 2 color pigments and are therefore red/green colorblind.) It ought to be possible in the same way to genetically transplant the gene for the fourth color in the same way. I think it would be real cool to see into the UV the way birds do.
Finally, I have a question. Nowadays, virtually all traffic lights have red on top and green on the bottom. But it wasn’t always so. There used to be a lot of horizontal traffic lights. How did colorblind people tell which was which? (Atlantic City used to use traffic lights in which the red was on top in one direction and the green on top in the perpendicular direction. That way, each traffic light had only three bulbs instead of 12.)
Not everyone who is colorblind is red/green colorblind.
There is more than one kind and degree of colorblindness.
So, for example, there are some people for whom red-yellow-green traffic lights might appear red-yellow-white. They can distinguish the traffic lights, even if they aren’t seeing the same color you are. When mounted horizontally (for example) the would still be able to distinguish stop-slow-go signals.
In my case, I am capable of seeing green well enough that traffic lights really are red-yellow-green to me, although the green looks somewhat bluish. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that “FAA green” is actually blue to me, so when I see the running lights on an airplane instead of being red-portside green-starboard and white-tail they are red-portside blue-starboard and white-tail. Likewise, lightgun signals are red-blue-white to me instead of red-green-white, but since I can distinguish the different colors sufficiently that I will not mistake one for another it’s not a problem. There are some people with a more extreme form of my color vision difference who do have a problem distinguishing red and green such that a red light and a green light of the same intensity do not have a discernible difference to them. That form of colorblindness is more disabling and could, indeed cause a problem with traffic lights that are mounted differently than the traditional top-to-bottom red-yellow-green.